If you're in need of a really good laugh right now, you have come to the right
place. In this Book Break video I've got 11 book recommendations that will properly
make you LOL. These books have literally made me laugh out loud. So let's get
straight into them. The first few are all told in diary format because that is so
often such a hilarious format for a book. So we're starting with Diary of a
Somebody by Brian Bilston. So this book is a year in the life of the fictional poet
Brian Bilston, and it starts on the 1st of January when he decides that his New
Year's resolution is he's going to write a poem every day. And then we watch him
try and keep up this resolution and fail, and also document all the other
ridiculous things that happen to him in this year. And when I say ridiculous I
really do mean it. It ranges from everything to him trying to organize all
of his bookshelves by ISBN number and then realizing that that's a totally
useless way of doing it, all the way to becoming the suspect in a
murder. It is a completely bonkers year. And the whole way through it you do get
his really funny poems dotted in. He's got such a great style. If you go into
Twitter and look up Brian Bilston, that's his fake name, he does write these really
hilarious commentaries on what's going on in the world, sometimes really mundane
things, sometimes really big things, but always in this really accessible and
just laugh out loud hilarious way. This book had made properly in stitches. Which
then brings me to (talking of stitches) This Is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay.
This is another diary one, these are the diaries of a junior doctor. So this is
Adam Kay looking back on the 10 years that he spent working as a doctor in the
NHS and revisiting the diaries that he kept at the time. And I never knew that
the life of a doctor could be that funny. It's such a good balance, this book,
because it really portrays all of the incredible hardships of being a doctor
with an NHS and the ways in which the NHS just needs more funding, so it's really a
powerful and persuasive book, but along the way it is just so funny.
Adam Kay has such a good sense of humour, and such a hilariously dry way of looking
at the sometimes pretty awful situations then he found himself in. So there's a
reason this book has been so huge, it really is that funny. And then a classic
diary is Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding so this one you've probably
seen the film a million times. The book is so brilliant. This follows
the life of Bridget Jones, a young single woman in her 30s, going through so many
relatable things, so her struggle with body image, her rather up and down
relationship with her mother, her love life which is often a complete disaster,
love triangles everywhere, and also her friendships which are kind of the most
important family that she has at that stage in her life. So there's a reason
this one is so timeless because it's just got so many things that we all go
through in it, and it's also got a touch of The Guilty Feminist about it because
there's quite a lot of Bridget talking about wanting to be a feminist but also
not sure how to balance that with wanting to make herself attractive to
men for example, so it's just really relatable stuff, it reminds you of the kind of
conversations that you have with your friends in a pub. Now the next one on my
list is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, which is a book
that I haven't read, as you all know if you've watched me trying to sum it up in 20
seconds, but I've been told by everyone who's read
it that is hilariously funny, and I googled some quotes from it and
instantly confirmed that was true. My favourite quote I found was in the
beginning the universe was created this has made a lot of people very angry and
been widely regarded as a bad move. So this is a kind of quirky sci-fi story that
I'm actually really excited to read now, and it's got a whole series, so there's
plenty to keep you laughing. There's five books and also there's the original
radio scripts, because it was a radio play before it was ever a novel. And then
I've got Notes on a Big Country by Bill Bryson. So Bill Bryson is an American
writer but he's lived most of his adult life in the UK. But he went back to the
States for about eight years from 1995 and that's when he wrote Notes from a
Big Country which has his observations of the United States as, essentially as
an outsider. And it is just so funny, highlighting so many of the weird quirks
about the States. My favourite section, which I cannot read without crying with
laughter, is when he talks about the process of filling out a US tax form. Now
I've never tried to fill out a US tax form, I have no frame of reference for
this. I don't even understand the context and yet I find it so hilariously funny.
So if you are American I can only imagine it's even funnier. And then
another one that I've read cover to cover multiple times and it still cracks
me up is Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops by Jen Campbell. So this was
originally a blog that Jen used to run, where she documented some of the
hilariously strange things the customers said when she was working in the
bookshop Ripping Yarns. And they're just so ridiculous,
you would think these people had never even heard of a bookshop before, or never
even heard of a book before, like one of the customers asks if a book is edible
at one point. And again there is a sequel so once you've read the original several
times over, as I have, there is then More Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops.
Now one of the most ridiculous novels I've ever read is The 100 Year Old Man
who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson. So this is
kind of like a Swedish Forrest Gump. So we have two timelines. In present-day
Alan Karlsson is living in a retirement home, he's just had his 100th birthday,
and he decides to climb out the window and escape. So he goes on to meet up with
this whole cast of equally odd characters, he accidentally steals a
suitcase full of money and then kick-starts this whole ridiculous
criminal adventure. There's an elephant involved at one point, it gets very
farcical. But throughout that we're also getting flashbacks to Alan Karlsson's life
growing up, and it turns out that he played a key role in basically every
major historical event of the 20th century. I honestly don't know which
timeline is funnier to read, but overall this book was one of my favourite reading
experiences ever. And if you like that one, it turns out that Swedish farcical
senior-citizen comedy is a whole genre, because you can then read The Little Old
Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Igelman-Sundberg. And again
this is just the start of a whole series so plenty more for you to enjoy. In this
first one we meet a little old lady who is tired of living in her care home and
decides what she really wants is to live a life of crime. So she and a few other
people from the care home call themselves the League of Pensioners and
they break out from the care home and go off on this Robin Hood style adventure,
sticking up for senior citizens everywhere. Now a classic is Three Men in
a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, and I really remember bringing this book on
a holiday with friends, and trying to read out sections of it to them that I
thought were so funny, but they literally couldn't get the words out because I was
laughing so hard. So this is the story of three men and a dog,
Montmorency, who go on a two-week boating holiday along the Thames.
And it was written in 1889 but it doesn't seem dated at all, the humour is so fresh.
The incident that's called, in the contents, George and his shirt: a story
with a moral, is probably my favourite part of the whole book. I'm not gonna
spoil it for you but do you go and read it and then come back and comment when
you've appreciated how brilliant that little episode is. And then another
classic is My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. So this is a kind of
exaggerated autobiography about Gerald Durrell's life and his hilarious family.
And this is the first book in the Corfu trilogy, so between all three of them
they cover Gerald Durrell's childhood in the beautiful Corfu. So young Gerald
Durrell, who grew up to become a naturalist, started his love for wildlife
then. So we get these descriptions of nature, but also we get him observing his
rather eccentric family as if they were also slightly strange animals. And it's
just these hilarious observations of family life from the
perspective of the youngest child. And then finally while we're on the topic of
eccentric families, A Not Quite Perfect Family by Claire Sandy is described as
being perfect for anyone who loves their family so much they'd just like a
weekend away from them. So this is a year in the life of this big imperfect family.
It begins and ends with their midsummer supper in the garden, so the year is kind
of compared to this 12 course fancy meal with each course being a different month.
And it's got a great cast of characters here, from the eight year old
militant feminist Tallulah, to the family's cleaner Evka, who tells these
really sexually explicit stories. It will make your family look almost normal!
(Maybe not my family.) So if you're looking for even more books
to make you laugh, we did make a whole video about funny classics, particularly
classics that you might never have realised were comedies. So do click
through to have a look at that video for even more recommendations and we'll see
you next time.